Is there a cancer conspiracy?

Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients,  Oct, 2005  by Ralph M. Moss

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This summer, the American Cancer Society (ACS) published a telephone survey and found some disturbing trends. In particular, its pollsters discovered that 27% of Americans believe that a cure for cancer already exists "but it is being withheld from the public in order to increase profits." According to the poll, another 14% of Americans aren't sure if this proposition is accurate, but will not dismiss the possibility. Not good news for an organization based on raising money for an impending cure!

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The ACS is clearly appalled by the fact that such a large percentage of the American public believes what the ACS characterizes as the "urban myth" of a secret cancer cure, and sees it as a sign of the ignorance of the lay population. But I think there is a deeper explanation, and it is one that the ACS would do well to heed. My interpretation is that the public's wariness on this issue indicates a healthy skepticism and a pervasive distrust of the repeated bland reassurances that everything is going well in the 34-year-old war on cancer.

I have sometimes been accused of fueling cancer conspiracy theories. However, as early as the 1970s I spoke out strongly against such theories. In my first book, The Cancer Industry, I wrote: "Not only is there no hard evidence that such a conspiracy to suppress a known cure for cancer exists, but such a theory defies logic as well" (1980).

I pointed to the obvious fact that leaders of the cancer establishment themselves are not immune to cancer and in fact often die of it. Also, at that time the pharmaceutical industry was already pouring tens of millions of dollars into the search for effective treatments.

But even though I don't subscribe to the notion that there is a conspiracy to withhold a cure, I do emphatically feel that potentially useful methods are being willfully ignored. "The important point," as I said in The Cancer Industry, "is that the suppression of unorthodox methods--and the promotion of the orthodox approach--takes place mainly at an unconscious level. It is an outgrowth of underlying economic and social trends rather than conscious design. This may explain the opposition of members of the establishment itself ... to this explanation, since they swim in the sea of this establishment, and are rarely conscious of its pressure all around them.

"[T]he evidence points to the fact that it is the system itself, rather than any particular clique of individuals, which is really to blame for failure to make progress against the cancer problem. In particular, the fact that cancer management is itself a big business means that it must function according to the rules of profit-oriented institutions."

A quarter of a century later, I still believe this is true. Yes, the flat-out conspiracy theory is nonsense and easily refuted. But the fact remains that the system itself strongly favors highly profitable treatments and relegates less profitable ones to the netherworld of banned or so-called "unproven" treatments.

Something Wrong

"Why would anyone hide a cure for cancer?" asks Ted Gansler, MD, MBA, Director of Medical Strategy for the American Cancer Society and lead author of the study. "Medical breakthroughs of all kinds are quickly announced and applied--as the world has seen with antibiotics and vaccines, such as the polio vaccine."

But this statement is not entirely true. Both the Salk vaccine and antibiotics were developed despite obstruction by powerful establishment interests (developments which I detailed in The Cancer Industry). There are in fact many reasons why effective (but intrinsically unprofitable) treatments would be ignored while dangerous or ineffective (but nonetheless profitable) ones promoted. The key question is how much the treatment can make for the pharmaceutical industry and its collaborators.

To read economic research about the cancer field is to feel a chill to the bone. All this talk about how "the NSCLC market is poised for dramatic growth" sounds encouraging until you realize that this "market" is built on the combined suffering of tens of thousands of fellow human beings.

Many would argue that we cannot do without the pharmaceutical industry for developing new drugs, and perhaps under current conditions they are right. But it is ludicrous to believe that drug companies are always ethical or would not engage in behavior that was harmful to the public. We have recently seen how top officials of major multinational drug companies knowingly allowed a certain class of drugs, the COX 2 inhibitors, to remain on the market although they knew for years that these drugs were quietly killing people.

Was there a conspiracy to promote the COX 2 inhibitors in spite of mounting evidence that these drugs were killing tens of thousands of people? Was there some connection between the reluctance of Merck and others to level with the public and the sale of $2.5 billion worth of Vioxx in 2003 alone? At the risk of being branded a conspiracy theorist, it is hard to escape the conclusion that there was indeed a malign purpose to these repeated "oversights."